The present invention relates to electronic musical instruments such as electronic wind instruments, electronic rubbed string instruments and electronic stringed instruments, and more particularly to electronic musical instruments capable of controlling parameters of a musical tone being produced in response to performance input operations such as breathing operation, lip operation and bow movement operation.
With a recent rapid development of electronic technology, there have been developed a wide variety of electronic musical instruments such as electronic wind instruments, electronic rubbed string instruments and electronic stringed instruments. In particular, electronic wind instruments are instruments capable of expressing musical tones in conformity with player's senses. In the electronic wind instruments, a breath sensor or a lip sensor provided on its mouthpiece portion translates breathing operation and lip operation of the player into electric signals, thereby allowing fine controls of sound volume and pitches of musical tones being electronically produced.
Such electronic wind instruments are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No(s). 3,767,833, 2,138,500, 2,301,184, 2,868,876, 3,429,976, 3,938,419 and 3,439,106. In the electronic wind instruments of this type, tone-designating switches are disposed at a position where the player can easily put his fingers. The player designates one musical tone (musical interval) with a combination of a plurality of these depressed switches.
Further, in the electronic wind instruments, when breath intensity has become higher than a predetermined value, a musical tone having the designated pitch is output with volume corresponding to the breath intensity and the pitch of the musical tone is delicately changed in response to intensity of the lip operation.
When an acoustic wind instrument is actually played, however, tone color of a musical tone is different at beginning of browing and stopping of browing, even though the same quantity of breath supply is blown through the instrument. And even in case that a certain tone pitch is designated, slight deviations from the above tone pitch can be caused. Also in the acoustic instrument, when the breath intensity is gradually increasing at the beginning of blowing, breath leaking sounds and white noise sounds are caused.
However, in conventional electronic wind instruments, sound volume of musical tones is controlled only by the breath intensity, i.e., level or value of breath data and various parameters of a musical tone are not controlled so as to be affected by breath intensity varying with time. As described above, the conventional electronic wind instruments are incapable of reproducing with a high fidelity performance effects which are exhibited particularly by the above acoustic wind instruments.
The electronic rubbed string instruments and the electronic stringed instruments have defects similar to the mentioned above. For instance, the conventional electronic rubbed string instrument, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,765,219 and French Pat. No. FR 2,598,017, is capable of controlling volume of musical tones being produced in accordance with the speed of the bow movement but is incapable of controlling parameters (volume, tone color, effect) of a musical tone to be produced. Hence, this electronic rubbed string instrument, for instance, is not capable of increasing volume and adding vibrato effect at an upwards tendency in the speed of the bow movement and also is not capable of decreasing volume and adding a tremolo effect at a downwards tendency in the speed of the bow movement.
Similarly, the conventional electronic stringed instrument, as described in U.S. Pat. No(s). 4,458,690 and 4,580,479, is incapable of controlling parameters of a musical tone to be produced, which parameters are affected by varying-with-time tendencies of the speed of bow-movement operation and of the intensity of string plucking operation. Therefore, by playing these electronic musical instruments, it is impossible to obtain performance effects similar to those expressed by playing classic acoustic rubbed string instruments and classic acoustic stringed instruments.